Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters #1)(77)

Villi careened around, throwing me a good fifty yards away with the force of his push. I landed with a strong whoosh, the air knocked from my lungs. I had been so focused on just mindlessly hacking away that I’d let him catch me at a disadvantage. And that, of course, was the catch with Torst.

Villi skittered towards me clumsily, an angry bear attached to his nose, gnawing away through the scales. He tossed her off, throwing her in the opposite direction of me. It was easy to see, though, that she had done some damage, blood dripping down to the ground from his wounded nose as he approached me. Good job, Sloan, I thought, a little surprised. Getting past the scales of a dragon that quickly was no small feat.

Just short of his goal, Villi froze oddly, and I quickly saw why as a bright blue glowing sword appeared out of his belly, followed by a bloody Christian.

He had literally gutted the dragon, I saw with shock. It was then that I finally realized that Lynn must have been at him with the hammer before we got here. It was the only thing that could possibly have Villi so weak so fast. Go sis, I thought, with wonder. She had somehow laid the groundwork for a hell of a dragon slaying. Somehow she had managed to hand us the upper hand, even though Villi had had the hammer. I couldn’t imagine how, but the how was not the important part.

Villi’s head careened oddly to the side, snapping from a blow too quick for me to see. Suddenly, Caleb just appeared, wielding the hammer for another blow to the dragon’s head. I should have known he was up to something. It was when you couldn’t see Caleb that you knew he was up to the most trouble.

All of this had happened in the few seconds it took me to stand up. I staggered to my feet, stalking forward purposefully to rejoin the fight.

Christian hacked at the beast’s neck with gusto, yelling curses at the prone dragon between blows. He was truly in his element today. I joined my axe to his sword, knowing decapitation was our best bet. And the sooner the better.

Torst fed hungrily as I chopped away. The dragon’s neck was thick, but we were making short work of it. The huge bear roared as it lumbered back into the fight, tearing great hunks from the dragon’s neck.

I quickly decided that three bloodthirsty fighters were enough to take the head, and made my way to the second most important goal.

Christian had already cleared a lot of my way to the heart with his precise gutting. Finding a heart still pumping blood through a body was one of Torst’s specialties. All I had to do now, really, was get messy.

I hacked at the flesh around that precious organ tirelessly from an awkward position below his underbelly. I finally just took a deep breath and waded into the disgusting, bloody depths of his insides. I submerged myself just long enough to see exactly where I needed to go. I surfaced, gasping. I pointed Torst in the right direction, and let it do the rest of the work. It was alive in my hands, chopping away at the twisting flesh and bone of the beast’s ribcage. Every part of Villi was weakened, and the muscle tissue gave way in short minutes, like so much butchered meat. I finally pulled the beating mass free from it’s intricate cage.

It was a full armful, and I fell on my ass as I finally got it separated from the body. Still, as awkward as it was to pick up, being the size of my entire torso and heavy as hell to boot, it was smaller than I would have thought a heart would be inside of that giant hideous beast.

“Caleb,” I screamed, and I knew I was a sight, covered in dark blood and entrails. He appeared quickly, swinging his new toy casually. He gave me a quizzical look. “Use the hammer on the heart. It will help further immobilize him, until Christian can cast his spells.”

I heard a bear roar, and Christian whoop happily, and I knew they had severed the head. He still wasn’t dead, but damn, it had just been too easy so far. Caleb started hacking at the heart without preamble. He pounded it again and again, and the hammer glowed that horrible, eery blue that I associated with my sadistic father.

Christian appeared from the other side of the prone dragon, dragging the severed head slowly. “Help me line this up next to the heart,” he told me. I obliged. “I’m not sure you should be real close by for the death-spell.”

I nodded curtly, heading to Lynn’s prone figure. It had been a struggle this entire time not to go to her.

Sloan almost beat me to her, in human form again, already re-dressed in black. She had to be the most efficient being on the planet. “Healing is a strength of mine,” she told me. “Let me check her out.”

Lynn was in rough shape, as I had known. She stirred a little as I sat beside her, holding one of her limp hands.

Sloan’s breath hissed out in a curse when she knelt by my sister. “Can you regrow body parts? Like, say, eyes?”

“Yes.” Like druids, we could regenerate body parts, eventually. “But if that hammer was involved, I have no idea.”

“You people and your special weapons,” Sloan said with disgust, as though I had done it.

Lynn was battered and bruised and broken. Sloan was able to help with a lot of the damage, but the eyes were a lost cause, for the moment. Possibly forever. It didn’t bear thinking about. We needed to finish up and get out of there. There was no way our epic battle had gone unnoticed.

“I got the jump on him, Jillian,” Lynn whispered to me as she came to. I laughed, painfully relieved.

“We saw that. We took him out easy, thanks to whatever you did to him.”

“I reversed a spell at him, then beat the shit outta him with that hammer. Christian better finish his ass.”